What a brand owes a festival
Every October the feed fills with diyas, and almost none of it is about the brand posting it.
A brand has standing in a festival when it contributes something to it: a product people actually use then, a genuine role in how it is celebrated, or money and effort put somewhere useful. Without one of those, a greeting post is wallpaper and an emotional film is borrowing.
Indian festive marketing runs on an assumption nobody examines: that a brand is entitled to participate in a cultural moment simply because its audience is observing it. Sometimes true. Mostly not.
Standing has to come from somewhere
Three things give a brand the right to speak in a festival. It makes something people genuinely use then. It plays a real part in how the occasion works, like travel, gifting, food or clothing. Or it does something materially useful, which means spending money rather than running a hashtag.
A software company posting a rangoli has none of those. It is not offensive, it is simply noise, and it costs the brand a small amount of the credibility it spent the year accumulating.
Why the emotional film keeps failing
The template is familiar: a family separated, a journey, a reunion, a slow track, a logo. It is made because it is safe, and it is forgotten because forty other brands made it the same week. Nothing in it could only have come from this brand.
The ones that last do something specific: a real observation about how the festival is actually experienced now, by the people living it rather than the people remembering it. That is harder and it is the entire job.
India is not one festive calendar
Onam, Durga Puja, Pongal, Baisakhi, Eid, Christmas in Goa and Kerala, and a dozen regional observances that matter more locally than the national ones a Mumbai agency defaults to. A brand with real regional presence and no regional recognition of it is telling its customers something about how closely it is paying attention.
The cost of getting it wrong
Appropriation reads instantly to the people whose festival it is, and it travels fast. The test is simple: would somebody who grew up with this recognise themselves in it, or recognise a stock image of themselves? Our longer argument is in what a campaign owes the culture it borrows from.
Questions we get asked
Should every brand run a festive campaign?
No. Without a product people use then, a genuine role in the occasion, or something materially useful to contribute, a festive post is wallpaper.
Why do festive brand films all feel similar?
Because they are built from the same safe template. The ones that are remembered contain a specific observation that could only have come from that brand.
Start with a Growth Audit
Every Colleviate engagement begins with an outside-in read of your brand and its competitive cluster, before we recommend a single line of spend.
Ask for a scoped auditWhat we do · How we produce it · Who we do it for · Talk to us